Blog for jtc

Saturday Dec 22, 2012

As evidenced at the recently completed JavaOne 2012 conference, community excitement towards the Raspberry Pi and its potential as a Java development and deployment platform was readily palpable. Fast forward three months, Oracle has announced the availability of a JDK 8 (with JavaFX) for Arm Early Access Developer Preview where the reference platform for this release is none other than the Raspberry Pi.

What makes this especially interesting to me is the addition of JavaFX to the Java SE-Embedded 8 platform. It turns out that at $35US, the (not so) humble Raspberry Pi has a very capable graphics processor, opening up a Pandora's box of graphics applications that could be applied to this beloved device. As a first step in becoming familiar with just how this works, I decided to dust off a two year old JavaFX scoreboard application, originally written for a Windows laptop, and see how it would run on the Pi. Low and behold, the application runs unmodified (without even a recompile).

The video that follows shows how an ordinary flat screen TV can be converted into a full screen electronic scoreboard driven by a Raspberry Pi. The requirements for such a solution are incredibly straightforward: (1) the TV needs access to a power receptacle and (2) it must be within range of a WiFi network in order to receive scoreboard update packets. The device is so compact and miserly from a power perspective, that we velcro the Pi to the back of the TV and get our power from the TV's USB port. If you can spare a few moments, it just might be worth your while to take a look.